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A Novel
by David Diop
Book Reviewed by:The hotly anticipated new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.
Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram.
The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée—a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade—to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.
Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.
I
Michel Adanson watched himself die under his daughter's gaze. He was wasting away, racked by thirst. His joints were like fossilized shells of bone, calcified and immobile. Twisted like the shoots of vines, they tormented him in silence. He thought he could hear his organs failing one after another. The crackling noise in his head, heralding his end, reminded him of the first faint noises made by the bushfire he'd lit one evening more than fifty years before on a bank of the Senegal River. He'd had to quickly take refuge in a dugout canoe, from where—accompanied by the laptots, his guides to the river—he'd watched an entire forest go up in flames.
The sump trees—desert date palms—were split by flames surrounded by yellow, red, and iridescent blue sparks that whirled around them like infernal flies. The African fan palms, crowned by smoldering fire, collapsed in on themselves, shackled to the earth by their massive roots. Beside the river, water-filled ...
Beyond the Door of No Return will resonate with readers drawn to either vivid settings or beautiful language. The book's prose is stunningly written and translated, with descriptions well worth savoring. This is a first-rate historical novel, richly conveying both the wider scope of the 18th-century colonization of Senegal and the individuals struggling to survive and find meaning within it...continued
Full Review
(657 words)
(Reviewed by Katharine Blatchford).
In David Diop's novel Beyond the Door of No Return, French botanist Michel Adanson journeys across 18th-century Senegal to discover the fate of a woman who was kidnapped. At the time of the story, much of the area was either directly or indirectly under the control of the French East India Company, a less-known competitor to the United East India Company.
Known in French as the Compagnie Française des Indes Orientales, the first French East India Company was founded in 1664 by Jean Baptiste Colbert with the backing of King Louis XIV as part of a wider plan to strengthen the French economy. The company was given several potentially lucrative grants, including a 50-year monopoly on trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. It ...
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